“Who knows if I want to go back,” he said to me very late that night. “Or who knows who I might bring back with me.”
“I’m not someone who gets brought along,” I told him, even if it was something of a lie. He laughed, his head resting on my discarded dress, which we had rolled up to make a pillow. We were stretched on the parlor floor of the mother-in-law unit behind my house, and somewhere faintly in the distance, we could hear the music from Daisy’s reception playing on, even if she had left hours ago.
“Not even if I’m the one bringing you?” he asked, and he kept me from answering by kissing my throat just right.
I was less careful than I should have been that night, and for the next three weeks, while being gay and lovely for Walter, I was something of a nervous wreck. I kept reminding myself that there was always Fulbright’s, that if Daisy could bear a thing I could, but it is different, isn’t it, when it’s your body, your future, your reputation, and your mistake.
In the end, my luck held, it was nothing at all, and of course by then, Walter had worked his way through his post-war wildness. We were through. I liked him better than I had let on, even to myself, and I came home at dawn three weeks after Daisy’s wedding, my throat hoarse from arguing, and my eyes and nose aching from the tears I refused to cry.
I crept into a house that was finally empty of guests, but it wasn’t until dead Anabeth met me on the stairs that I realized something was wrong.
Anabeth had recognized right away that I was no real Baker. When I first came to live on Willow Street, she had kept me up and crying in terror at all hours, but as I grew, and especially when I started having my monthlies, I crossed some river in her mostly-gone mind, and she gentled, no longer waiting for me in the corner of my room or coming upon me while I was having my evening bath.
Now, though, she stood on the stairway as she never had before, and the temperature dropped so fast I could see my breath for a brief moment. I froze, ready to run, but she pointed down towards the side hallway, where the only room was the judge’s study.
I followed her pointing finger, aware the whole time of her eyes on the back of my neck. I opened the door, and for a moment I was actually relieved to see the judge sitting at the desk, the only light from the single lamp in the corner.
Then he looked up at me, nothing living in his eyes, and I became aware of the pair of feet peeking out from behind the desk, all that was visible of the judge after he had fallen from a fast and fatal stroke.
I stared to scream, but the ghost, not putting down his pen, pointed at me. His eyes, like Anabeth’s, were shaded dark, completely without light or anything like human emotion.
“No,” he said, in a voice that seemed to come from a great distance over a silver wire. “You were taught better.”
I had been. I closed the door gently behind me, and went to the front room, turning on every light as I did so. I went to the phone, and with a voice that I was convinced would never shake again, I started to make the necessary calls, to the Coy Funeral Parlor, which had been burying Bakers since before the Civil War, and to First Grace Presbyterian, where the judge and I attended only sporadically without Mrs. Baker to force us.
Then it was time to take Mrs. Baker’s little leather-bound book from its spot by the phone, and to call the family. I did well enough until I came to one I hardly knew. It was the judge’s aunt, listed only as Mrs. Sigourney Howard.
I introduced myself, explained what had happened, accepted her condolences and well wishes as I had already done two dozen times that morning, and then she paused, the distance between Louisville and New York crackling along the wire.
“My dear, you needn’t be so strong. We’re family. Tell me how you are.”
It wouldn’t have hit with any force on a regular day, but that morning, the rain coming down hard, my heart more broken than I wanted to admit, and a new ghost in the house, it pried something open in me that had always been shut before. The tears escaped, and I gasped at the pain of it before I started sobbing, sitting on the ground with the telephone cord stretched to its full extent.